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3. LILO configuration dialog

Now that you know a little bit what LILO can do, let see how you can configure it using Linuxconf. The main configuration dialog is split in sections. Here is an introduction to each.

3.1 Global features

This section deal with how to install LILO.

Disabling LILO

If you boot your Linux system without LILO, you may find Linuxconf behavior a little bit annoying as it try to make sure LILO is properly setup-ed all the time. You can disable LILO support from Linuxconf anytime. This only affect Linuxconf though. This does nothing else. It won't UN-install LILO. It just say to Linuxconf

"stop checking lilo".

Install boot sector on

LILO is brought to life by firing a tiny tiny program. This program must be installed in a strategic location. The pop-up list of this field offers you a list of valid choice is order of preference. If Linux is the active partition it does not matter much. If it is not, or your Linux partition is not on the first hard drive, you must install it on either the master boot record of the first drive, or on a boot floppy.

Note that installing the boot sector on a boot floppy is still pretty fast as only one sector is read from it. All other files still lives in the Linux partition.

If you have another boot manager (The OS/2 boot manager for one), then a safe choice is to install the boot sector right in the linux partition. You will have to tell your other boot manager about this new partition. The OS/2 boot manager can boot (as LILO) linux even if it is located on a second hard drive (not the primary one).

Bios boot mode

Known to boot faster. Known not to work on some machines. I have no experience with it.

Boot delay

LILO may boot right away or wait for some time, allowing you to intercept the boot sequence. From there you can

By pressing the SHIFT and TAB keys at the same time the boot delay is disable and "boot:" prompt will appear.

A value of 50 is recommended.

Message file

You must put the path of a text file. Ideally, the text will be short and will fill the screen, leaving the LILO prompt at the bottom. This is used for the boot floppies of some distributions.

3.2 Defaults

This section provide the default configuration applying the to different Linux configuration following. Entering information here avoid repeating it later.

Root partition

You must tell where your Linux root partition is sitting. A pop-up list gives you a list of all partitions.

Ram disk size

Ram disk are used for installation boot disks. They are seldom used for full configuration. Recent development of kernel modules have made ram disk runtime configurable. A value of 0 disable the ram disk feature.

Boot mode

Normally this flags is on. For UMSDOS installation, it is off. UMSDOS installation will generally use loadlin to boot instead of LILO anyway.

Unless you really what your doing, then left it to on. Here is why. When Linux boots, in read-only mode, it is allowed to do much inspection of the partitions without touching them at all. This is good especially if the boot follows a crash which has left the partitions in a weird state.

Why all the fuss about not touching the partition ? Well, Linux support multiple time stamps per file. One is the "last access date". This means that the file system is changed (data is written to the disk) just by reading files (which is exactly what happen at boot time).

This last access time stamp is pretty useful both becomes a nuisance at boot time. The "read only" tells Linux to drop this behavior.

After the partition has been checked, the system will set back to "read write" mode automatically.

Boot options

Some drivers required some information to correctly initialized themselves. For example, Linux is probing only for one Ethernet adaptor. If you have two, you can write in this field

        ether=11,0x300,eth1
        

This will tell Linux to check for a second adapter (the first being eth0) at IRQ 11 and IO 300 hex.

There is a complete document about boot time configuration. Note that the forthcoming Linux 1.4 will dramatically changed this has run time modules will make a widespread appearance.

The document can be found at ______________.

3.3 Linux setups

The default section is followed by several identical sections. Each defines one Linux boot configuration. Each boot configuration repeats all the parameter of the default section. You can simply override them here.

The first configuration will be the default one. This means that LILO will boot this one unless told differently (Using SHIFT TAB to stop the boot process...).

Only 3 fields differ from the default section.

Delete this configuration

If you check this box, the configuration will disappear when you will hit the accept button.

Kernel image file

This is the path of the kernel file which will boot for this configuration. Note that one kernel file may participate to several configurations.

Label

This is a short name identifying uniquely the configuration. Given that a kernel file may be shared by several configuration, we need a unique key. This will be used when intercepting the boot process. LILO expect simply a label name and will boot the corresponding configuration.

3.4 Other operating system

LILO is able to boot almost anything. For each OS you want to boot, simply specify the partition and a label. LILO simply load the boot sector of that partition and launch it.


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